First week back
It seems silly to think of a “first week back” after only having been back for a week, but jet lag has a way of making even comfortable beds in comfortable...
Paris II
Paris was, to me, a city where it was impossible to stay jaded. I loved the way you order espresso with cafe un cafe noisette (noisette meaning hazelnut, a...
SEA → SLC → CDG
Writing this en route to Paris, via Salt Lake City. (I volunteered to give up my seat for $500 and my only penance is getting in three hours later, which...
What's new with you?
I am very bad at lulls in conversation. There are friends with whom I am comfortable in silence; these are the close friends, the chess-at-breweries friends,...
Snow days
There are so many things I want to tell you about, to make up for lost time. I was in Vegas. This was my first time in Vegas, and it was ... not quite what I...
The Big Apple!
If cities are machines designed to produce interactions between people, New York is the largest and most efficient one to which I've visited. It was, in...
2019, part one
On the last day of the year, I wrote about it. It was a weird and mostly fun year, and 2019 seems poised to be the same. I. On the first morning of the first...
Wake up early!
I realized this week that I have become the coworker who talks obnoxiously about waking up early. It is great. (You should wake up earlier.). Aristotle has...
All the buildings of the living
The advantage of having written this newsletter for over a year and a half now is that I can mark the deja vu of things: this time last year I was writing...
Thoughts on thirty minutes of Xcode after two years away
Oh god, this again. Swift is really nice. It's a shame about the rest. How did a path to a font get hardcoded to /Users/jmduke/Downloads? Why did I suddenly...
Hitting resume
How do you start something? When I was in Richmond, I stopped by my mom’s CS class to answer some questions about being a ‘real’ programmer (a title and...
How I pack
Ada Limón: Every time I'm in an airport, I think I should drastically change my life: Kill the kid stuff, start to act my numbers, set fire to the clutter...
Five Recommendations
Some things I've done the past few weeks that I recommend: I recommend dogsitting. Specifically, dogsitting these two dogs in Magnolia: Maggie and Max....
Carving marble
I haven’t written about Buttondown in a while because I haven’t worked on anything on Buttondown worth writing about. This is for a couple reasons: It was...
The New Phone: A Review
I mean, it's a phone. And what do you use a phone for nowadays? You are never too far away from a laptop; you still hate sending texts by tapping on glass....
Ten lessons from XOXO
For whatever reason, this floors me. It felt like one thing for Judith Bronte’s work to find me in this way; fed into a recombinatorial machine, cut into...
Bluemont Park
I am struck by how, except when you're young, you really need to prioritize in life, figuring out in what order you should divide up your time and energy. If...
Centrifuge
If you have spent the past week or two in Seattle, you know that it is has been a bizarre hellscape. The smoke (some coming from northern Washington, some...
What I've learned about Jira
A task should correspond with exactly one deliverable. The task should be written not as if it's going to be read for the next two weeks by your current team...
Seven days in Kaua'i
Hello! I'm writing this from Lihue Airport, waiting to board my flight from Kaua'i to Seattle. (I am not sure if it is Lihue Airport or Lihue International...
Off days
I was talking with my manager during our weekly one-on-one and I brought up that I was having an off day. It was one of those days where I just couldn't get...
Lazy Sunday
This has been the first quiet weekend in a while. It has been very nice, but the thing with quiet weekends is that sometimes I do not know what to write...
Your first ninety days
I recently completed my ninety-day survey at Stripe, which was a surprise because wait, I've been there for ninety days? So, here's the thing. Being new in...
Levers
What are the obvious ways to make your life better? I bought an electric bike, and this was my first week commuting with it. It was extremely rad; my commute...
On call
How do you explain on-call to a friend? I mean, they are your friend — they are smart and kind and patient. When you fumble through the first inexact...
What should developers read?
We had someone new join the team. This is always exciting. He asked if there were any books he should read to get more information: about our stack, about...
The Singer Addresses His Audience
August 2005: I am given the most precious device I have ever owned: a half-busted MP3 player. I think it had sixteen megabytes, which is a number that seems...
How we build things
They're building a massive office building across the street from our office, and its construction has proved a source of endless distraction and fascination...
When Your Friend Asks You To Run In A Dog-Friendly 5K Starting In An Hour, You Say Yes
My legs are tired as I write this! On a moment's (well closer to ten moments') notice I ran the somewhat unfortunately named Furry 5K with a friend. There...
Happy little accidents
You've probably heard this anecdote before, right?: A very large government bid, approaching a million dollars, was on the table. The IBM Corporation—no,...
Kino
If we have spent an extended amount of time together, we have probably talked about Murakami. (Sorry.) And if we have talked about Murakami, and you haven't...
Duffel bag
What does your best morning look like? I ask because I have been thinking a lot lately about morning routines! This is the first week that I've spent...
It's good to be wrong!
Here is an essay I liked a lot: I’m going to be honest: I’ve had a hell of a time getting my head around React. More than any other technology I’ve touched...
What I learned on my summer vacation
I am so happy to be back in Seattle, where it is filled with warmth and sunlight and dogs who are experiencing the world as if for the first time. I know...
Airplane mode
I'm in Seattle for another twelve hours — back in town briefly for a friend's bachelor/bachelorette party — before heading back to San Francisco. It is...
How to play tourist
Here's what you do: First, go for a bike ride. It does not much matter where you go on the bike ride; you can take the Embarcadero if you want, going from...
Thank you, faster and faster
I’m writing today’s note on a flight to San Francisco, where I’ll spend the next three weeks onboarding at Stripe as an engineer on the Sigma team. I am...
All Villanova's fault
Due to a great amount of luck and literally no amount of foresight or knowledge, I won a bunch of March Madness brackets this year, netting almost a thousand...
52 Years
I've been bingeing old episodes of Conversations with Tyler and he had a quote that's stuck with me all week (emphasis mine): COLLISON: Right, right. I think...
Vernorexia
If life in your mid-twenties is an accumulation and nurturing of a bouquet of simple pleasures, I have added a new flower — dockless bikeshare. Hm, that's an...
Silence and text
I wrote a few months back about the Seattle Antiquarian Book Fair, and this week was its sister event: the aptly titled Huge Book Sale thrown by the Friends...
300mg
I got back into Seattle both mid-day and mid-week, which almost seems unfair. My ideal time to arrive back from the airport is around 8pm: enough time to...
Notes from Ballston
(I'm in DC for the first part of the week to catch Heat/Wizards with the entire family on Tuesday. Now that I'm at the point in my life where cross-country...
What you need to get by
Here's a genre of tweet I think about a lot: Emily Kager @EmilyKager My sister (freshman in college) texted me for Big-O proof help for her Algorithms class...
Ten pieces of flash fiction
It snowed today. It was for a couple minutes, max: I looked at the window and it was a regular Seattle window, overcast, a couple folks in Patagonias walking...
4th and Wall
I'm writing this from the first coffeeshop I ever worked at in Seattle, the Uptown Espresso on 4th and Wall. It has, mercifully, not changed at all. The...
COE
One of my favorite things about the time I spent at Amazon was its COE process. COE stands for correction of errors: its a document your team fills out...
Terribly mystical
The past few days have been bright and pulsing and spent in the soothing Palo Alto sun: I got a healthy sunburn on my shoulders for deigning to wear a tank...
Dust and time
A couple things about clothes moths: It is impossible for me to not type clothes moths as clothes mothes. The frictional contrast of thes and ths is...
Concrete
Most startup-y advice doesn't apply to Buttondown, mostly because, well, Buttondown isn't a startup. It's roughly the shape of one, sure, and it's matured to...